Danger

[cleveland]

This site has really begun to take off, I am enjoying the postings and the spirit of the participants.

As I read, I feel a sense of community evolve. It's wonderful, but I also am reminded how dangerous that great sense of belonging can be. How easy then it is to exploit, or to exclude, or to feel better than others.

I wonder if Art, as an addict in early recover, had that sense of joy and thought, now I get it? And eventually, he bacame stuck with the idea that he knew better, that it's 'my way or the highway'? And then the promise of the early ideals is lost.

Closed systems don't function. Life seems to demand that we stay open.

I don't buy the conspiracy theories voiced elsewhere on this site. It may be true that the Seed model developed in some underground bunker, but I doubt it. I think it's just ideas that were out there, it fit the times, and there was money and energy available. It's probably also true that power and influence was a part of the equation - but a plot to enslave the citizens and make them docile? Really???

I just think the danger is not the conspiracy but in human nature. We need to constantly challenge power and help the dissidents have a voice.

(Soapbox Warning!)

[Anonymous]

The idea is to not be complacent but to always question.  We were beat down, verbally, emotionally and in some cases physically restrained - supposedly for our own good.  It's not that I don't trust or that I think there's a boogie man around every corner.  My seed and post-seed church experience taught me to never trust any large human machine percisely because it is human.  Anything can be hijacked for the personal agenda of one or a few.  Consider, too, that there was a time when you and I would never have tolerated such ideas to be expressed in our presence for fear of what?  I don't know, I just know I wasn't allowed to speak with people who had an different ideas.  

What happened to open our minds to open them up?    

Straying from the Good Seed/ Bad Seed discussion is a big step. But if you are willing to consider the program a cult, you have to consider who or what is funding it and, more importantly, why.  Read about it - its out there. I don't think it's as wholesome as we were led to believe.  

I can't see anyplace that did what it did to kids, taking tax money in the form of federal grants and tax deductible charitable donations from private individuals for the sole purpose of ridding society of a pox that didn't exist as possessing any kind of benevolent qualities.

Think about it: food, sleep, communication and body excretion deprivation.  Maybe they stopped short of attaching electical wires to body parts, but what they did do just wasn't right.  And that is just the surface activity that everyone was subjected to.  

Just because we,  or our parents, consented to put ourselves/us in there does not make Art and his minoins blameless, good people. Our uninformed consent does not relieve them of responsibilty for their actions - no matter where the directive came from.

Consent to a trip to the Seed only required full disclosure on one side of the equation - the front row side.

[Antigen]

On 2004-11-18 13:32:00, cleveland wrote:

 It's probably also true that power and influence was a part of the equation - but a plot to enslave the citizens and make them docile? Really???

"From the bottom of any large organization looking up through the ranks, human greed and stupidity look a lot like a conspiracy."
--S. Gilbert

Obviously, there are too many people and too many factors beyond anyone's control or ability to predict for a tight conspiracy theory to hold up. However, I think there was and is an agenda to influence our culture. And I think it's based on rather hysterical notions about the mystical power of psychotropic substances and youthful dissent and rebellion.

When I first heard the term COINTELPRO, I thought it was pretty far out there. Turns out, it was an actual government covert operation employed against American citizens. It's all documented and out in the open now. Well, maybe not all out in the open. But even the government openly acknowledges the existance and general purpose of the Mad Monks operation. When I first heard about the NSA (back in the early `80's, btw, from an exboyfriend who claimed to be ex CIA) I didn't believe that either. Now they agency has a sign out in front of their headquarters in Ft. Mead, MD.

The Program is a whole lot easier to track than that. Just read the mission statements and press releases from agencies and organizations like NIDA, ONDCP, DFAF, DPNA, OFBCI and myriad others such as the newly created NSDAP (I shit you not!
http://blog.drugpolicy.org/2004/10/ondc ... ipped.html As Ethan Strafin noted, either they're too stupid to live, or now they're just taunting us.)

Ok, one more trite quote to try and clarify my point.

"a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defence of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason."--Thomas Paine

None of us are old enough to remember an America where even a child could run an errand down to the local apothecary to pick up some morphine or cannabis tincture or any other substance w/o a Rx for an ailing family member. It seems perfectly good and right and proper to most of us that the government should make our drug taking decisions for us and enforce those dictates by any means necessary.

But, in the last 100 years or so since we began ceding our autonomy in this area of our lives, all of the problems associated w/ drug use, production and distribution have gotten worse, not better. And this new method of dealing w/ drug use as a public matter instead of a private one has generated a whole raft of problems that simply didn't exist in this country prior to the implimentation of this most expensive, failed New Deal progrom.

I think it's time we acknowledge that there really is a vast, expansive and invasive network of federal, state and local agencies dedicated to controling our knowledge, attitudes and beliefs about drugs, that it has failed misserably by comparison to the way we used to deal w/ this issue and that it's high time we dismantled the whole damned machine.

The overwhelming majority of people have more than the average (mean) number of legs.  
-- E. Grebenik

_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Seed sibling `71 - `80
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
   10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity Anonymous
Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

[Antigen]

Sorry, reading this over again, it needs one more bit of clarification.

I think the Seed and similar programs fit into this puzzle in a specific way. Essentially, prohibition had failed, misserably and obviously, by the late `50's. By the `60's, this failure of public policy opened up a huge vulnerability because a large segment of the younger generation, seeing the failure, was rejecting the entire culture and breaking all the taboos. "Why don't we do it in the road?", right?

So, by the early `70's, rather than go along w/ Jimmy Carter and Dr. Peter Bourne (then head of NIDA) and simply concede error wrt marijuana, our government went to war on youth culture in totality.

I think programs like The Seed as well as broader programs like the silly Ad Council ads and DARE in the schools, for example, are an attempt to deny and destroy the hated truth that the Greatest Generation have been wrong about a few things, including the morbid threat of smoking a joint once in awhile.

This is not to say that the people who promote these programs and policies are aware of their error and conciously trying to cover up. I think a good many of them actually still equate a kid smoking a joint w/ those kids who joined the Manson Family and went out and hacked up some yuppies. To them, it's worth the costs and the damage. How many times have you heard "Well, it may have been brainwashing, but you needed a good brainwashing."

To err is human. But to really fuck things up requires government funding. Let's just let the public know how misguided this whole thing is so they'll vote to cut off the public funding. I don't think these crack pots can do much harm on only what they can generate privately.

Web pages are like babies -- creation involves a level of enthusiasm that does not necessarily carry over into maintenance.
--Joe Chew

[Tony Stark]

He was when the seed got funding by the government because Art had a crackpot mouth and our counter-culture scard the older people like our parents. This is just what I believe. It may be wrong, but the government knew all about the Seed when I was in active duty. :smokin:

The most serious parody I have ever heard was this: In the beginning was nonsense, and the nonsense was with God, and the nonsense was God.
--Freidrich Nietzsche, German philosopher

That's a shame. He's good to me._________________
"This is a Republic"-VA Man.

[Antigen]

Oh hell yeah, they did!

From: http://thestraights.com/reports/us_involvement.htm

In 1971 the United States Senate's Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights under the directorship of Senator Sam Ervin began an investigation of the US government's role in behavior modification. Ervin's 650 page report was published in November 1974 under the title "Individual Rights and the Federal Role in Behavior Modification." Other members of the subcommittee included: Senators John McClellan, Arkansas, Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts, Birch Bayh, Indiana, Robert Byrd, West Virginia, John Tunney, California, Edward Gurney, Florida, Roman Hruska, Nebraska, Hiram Fong, Hawaii, Strom Thurmond, South Carolina, and Lawrence Baskir, Chief Counsel, Dorothy Glancy, Counsel, Joseph Klutz, Research Assistant, Alfred Pollard, Research Assistant, and George Downs, Sr, Chief Printing Clerk, and Anita Kinlaw, a legal intern. The report includes a study of Straight's predecessor program, The Seed, and concludes that The Seed used methods similar to the "brainwashing" methods employed by North Koreans against American servicemen during the Korean War.


It was because of this stipulation to require clients to sign human consent forms, in large part, that Seed expansion programs like the one in Saint Petersburg, Florida shut down in the first place.

Sidebar
The Declaration of Helsinki governs all medical research in the United States. It states "The right of the research subject to safeguard his or her integrity must always be respected. Every precaution should be taken to respect the privacy of the subject and to minimize the impact of the study on the subjects physical and mental integrity and on the personality of the subject." . . . "The doctor should be particularly cautious if the subject is in a dependent relationship to him or her or may consent under duress." The Nuremberg Code of Ethics in Medical Research requires that research subjects must "be able to exercise free power of choice without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, overreaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion."
Since The Seed was then being funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), under NIH, and since NIDA was then directed by Dr. Robert L. DuPont, Jr., the White House's Second Drug Czar, Senator Ervin directed Dr. DuPont and NIDA to require The Seed to issue NIDA human consent forms to Seed participants and to their parents acknowledging that they were participating in human experimentation as required by NIDA's own regulations.

Here's the cover and relavent page from that report.
http://thestraights.com/images/seed-Ervin-brainwash.gif

Everything that people say to you is personal. Whether it is constructive criticism or not will determine whether it cam from and asshole or not.

----Bill Warbis

_________________
Ginger Warbis ~ Antigen
Seed sibling `71 - `80
Straight South (Sarasota, FL)
   10/80 - 10/82
Anonymity Anonymous
Some days, it's just not worth chewing through the leather straps.

[GregFL]

I was interned in the St Pete when the Irwin report was being prepared. We weren't privy to the fact that the study was going on, but I do remember some government suits hanging around a bit.

I also remember Art Barker appearing before the group seething mad proclaiming "fuck them, we will do it without them, absolutely furious over the disclosure forms.

This report, along with the fearless reporting of the St Pete times, and the belated but important awakening of the St Pete independent after numerous abuse reports and the Irwin report, caused decreased enrollment and interest in the St Pete seed.

True to form, when the money dried up the seed disappeared almost overnight, citing financial problems.

To me, Senator Irwin and the st pete times staff writers were 70s era heroes to us children held against our will in those crazy experimental mind control cults.

Thank you people wherever you are.

[I'll kick your arse]

:jamin:

[lonewolf]

I remember helping to pack the place up in St Pete. That was the last time I was there.....Remember Art saying....don't have a damm thing to do with Straight Inc......Those folks are fucked up.....You know he was right....as I read the night-mares those kids went through.

[none-ya]

Hey Wolf, it sounds like the seed closing broke your heart.

 :waaaa:  :cry:  :waaaa:

[lonewolf]

Naw.....I got over it....and adjusted pretty well....Had a whole wide world to explore, without the Seed...I done well.

[none-ya]

If the seed never bothered you,how did you wind up here?

[lonewolf]

I typed in Art Barker.....and it gave me this fucking site....I wanted to see other peoples views....At first I thought it was neutral.....But I found out differently....whats your story...You didn't complete the program....are you pissed about that....or do you have some deep SEEDED issues your still working on?

[none-ya]

Bad pun. And no I told you before I never completed the program. I knew it was a scam from the moment I arrived. I was a newcomer living at home when I made my escape. I came to this site trying to find a couple of specific people with (with no luck)  But I stayed here after learning about all the programs that came after the seed and straight. I guess the only issues I have are with people that willingly drank the koolaid and to this day swear that the seed helped them,(or anybody for that matter) If you were there at the end of the st. pete era you know that a bunch of senior staff were busted for drugs. Look up the st. pete. times archives.

[lonewolf]

Sorry about the pun.....didn't know about any staff members being busted.....I was a old timer for about a year when they pulled up stakes and moved...I'm here to see other peoples views and to maybe learn something about myself and why I do some of the things I do......Understanding....and i have discovered and addressed these....So this site is good if you open to others views....I'm not gonna sit here and praise the program...cause it wasn't for everyone and it did effect peoples lives, in not a positive way